Jose Zagal's Home Page - Games & Game Studies

Home	Talks and Slides	My GameLog	Research and Projects	Publications	Resume	Teaching
Back // GameBreadth Project // Game Ontology Project // GameLog

Egg Inc. (iPd) Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored I started playing this game on Sunday 12 November, 2017 // I stopped playing this game on: Tuesday 14 November, 2017
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
November 14, 2017 09:50:31 PM
I've been playing this for a week(?) now - mostly because I've been on a loosely investigative (experiential?) exploration of idle/clicker games. I think this is my 4th in the last month or so. The premise is fun, you're selling eggs - so you tap to get chickens and then spend all the money researching better eggs and improvements that make your entire operation more efficient. But, it's a weird game on a few fronts... a. The "core" activity - tap to get more chickens, never gets better/automated in any significant way. At the beginning, it matters...but once you're past the thousands...all you get is a bonus multiplier (small, in the grand scheme of things) that only lasts while there are chickens coming out of the hatchery - which is less than 10-15 seconds. b. The core driver of the economy comes from watching ads (you can't choose to do it, you randomly get the opportunity every now and then), tapping on drones (that randomly appear and fly across the sky), and random gifts (that appear as delivered boxes). So, to make significant progress in the game you can't play it idly - you have to pay attention, with your phone on. c. Offline benefits are super slim - I was NEVER able to buy/improve anything from having not played and coming back to the game. So, you can't "let your economy" grow - because it doesn't. A few drones and a minute of paying attention will probably get more progress than 2 hrs offline. d. The progression curve felt quite smooth until slightly over halfway through. I hit a cliff HARD. (going from Tachyon to Graviton eggs). It's so bad I decided to quit as soon as I learned what the next egg was (Graviton). So, it's a weird idle game because it's not idle. You make progress via the action parts, really. It's also not really a clicker game - because the clicking quickly becomes meaningless. It does heavily favor the re-start (prestige) which is weird/interesting because the core loop ALSO has a re-start loop inside of it. Each time you upgrade your egg you have to start over. But when you prestige start-over you get special soul eggs that give you a nice multiplier for everything else. Overall, the game feels weirdly out of balance - I never had issues with having enough hatchery capacity (the main thing you build/upgrade) and neither did I have issues with the transportation (you also buy/upgrade trucks to carry eggs away). I suspect this might become more prominent later - but so far it seems to easy and, well, mostly meaningless.

Egg Inc. (iPd)